Imperial Palace to Asakusa

Enter the East Gardens at Ote-mon, the ceremonial gate, and take the numbered tag they hand you. Walk up through the Ninomaru garden to the Tenshudai, the bare stone base of the castle keep that burned in 1657 and was never rebuilt. Climb it. This is the centre of the map you are about to walk across, and the empty platform makes the point better than a reconstruction would.

Leave by Hirakawa-mon on the north-east side and head east. Within ten minutes you are in Nihonbashi, and at the bridge of that name – the point from which every distance in Japan was measured in the Edo period, and still the zero marker for the national road network. There is an expressway directly over it, which is either a scandal or the most honest thing in Tokyo depending on your temperament.

The streets around it are the old merchant quarter: department stores descended from seventeenth-century kimono dealers, knife shops, paper shops, and the Bank of Japan in a Meiji-era building modelled on European classicism.

North from Nihonbashi the city changes character every few blocks. Kanda was the artisans’ district and retains the street grid and some of the trade: Jimbocho, slightly west, is a whole neighbourhood of second-hand bookshops and is worth a detour of an hour if books are your weakness.

Continue north-east and you hit Akihabara, which was a radio-parts market after the war, became the electronics district, and is now the anime and gaming district. Walking into it from Kanda rather than arriving by train makes the continuity obvious: it is still a district of small specialist stalls, and only the specialism has changed.

From Akihabara, cross the Kanda river and continue north-east. The blocks here are ordinary and that is useful: this is what most of Tokyo actually looks like between the places guides send you, and twenty minutes of it does more for your understanding of the city than another temple would.

Kuramae is the surprise of the walk. It was the shogunate’s rice warehouse district and is now full of small makers – leather, notebooks, coffee roasters, ceramics – in converted warehouse buildings. It has been called Tokyo’s Brooklyn, which is lazy but not wrong, and it is an excellent place to stop for coffee about two-thirds of the way through.

From there follow the Sumida river north. The riverside path gives you Tokyo Skytree on the opposite bank growing steadily larger, which is a good piece of accidental staging.

Arrive at Asakusa at Azuma-bashi bridge and walk into the temple precinct from the east, which avoids Nakamise entirely and delivers you beside the pagoda. Time it for late afternoon and you get the temple as the light goes; the main hall shuts at 17:00 but the grounds never close, and the floodlighting after dark is the best free spectacle in eastern Tokyo. The free eighth-floor terrace at the tourist information centre opposite Kaminarimon lets you look back over the route you have just walked.